A mandatory spot for all those that visit Panama is the visitor center of Miraflores, where one of the most important locks of the Panama Channel is located. The channel is easily visible when you land at Panama City, with the well noted ship traffic between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans.
The trip to the Miraflores locks takes about 15 to 20 minutes from Panama City, with the visitor center showing clearly how this impressive engineering work functions. You can see in loco the operations with the flow of ships through the locks.
The operation is quite complex and spend a lot of water. The channel is in fact formed from the junction of multiple lakes, and in the way through them the ships go through a lot of leveling processes, in which large quantities of water are transfered in a few minutes.
A ship takes about 12 hours to pass the Panama channel, that works 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. The saving of time and fuel versus the alternative of going around the continent is colossal, which makes this a critical infrastructure for world commerce.
There are a number of interesting videos on youtube that show the timelapse of all the process, like this one, that runs in 7 minutes the 11 hours of the passing through the channel.